Become the go-to engineer in your organization
Build a great reputation for yourself by taking ownership and helping others thrive!
Intro
Engineers that are not afraid to take ownership and responsibility are highly desirable. And if they also make others around them better → that’s what provides a LOT of value to the engineering organization and the overall company as well. Becoming the go-to person means exactly that.
Let’s define next what a go-to person should and shouldn’t do.
Being a go-to person doesn’t mean you should hoard the knowledge for yourself
So what should you do as a go-to person? You shouldn’t focus just on making sure that you understand the specific domain, project or technology, but the focus should be on making it easier for everyone to get started and work with it.
Here is what you shouldn’t do:
❌ Don’t keep the knowledge and the context only to yourself
❌ Not creating any documentation
❌ Not being supportive, not being helpful to onboard and support others working on that specific thing
Here is what you should do:
✅ Spread the knowledge and awareness about it
✅ Create documentation and learning documents
✅ Provide support, be helpful and be there when others need help
Becoming the go-to person is very important to grow towards Senior and Lead roles
Especially for Tech Lead / Team Lead roles, it’s really important that you are considered a person that others go to when they need help or they have some specific question.
It shows that you have credibility and others consider you as an expert. It also shows that others trust your opinion and your judgment.
You don’t need to become the go-to for everything. Being the go-to for 1 thing and doing that well is a lot better than being the go-to for more and you are doing a mediocre job on all of them.
Focusing on going deep and really taking care of 1 single thing is what provides the most value. Think about it like this: 1 specific person in the organization takes really good care of a specific part → the result will be that all of them will be greatly organized.
Read more about how to grow from mid-level to senior to lead role here:
How to grow from mid-level to senior Software Engineer (paid article)
How to grow from senior to a lead role (paid article)
How to become the go-to person?
There are a number of different ways to do that, choose the one that fits you best. Playing to your strengths is the best way to know which approach will work for you.
Become the go-to person for a specific project
Take ownership of the project and responsibility to get everyone on the same page + ensure that everyone is building the right things.
You may ask, that this might be the responsibility of the product/project manager? Well, that’s not the case, because the product manager does not understand all of the technical details, but you do.
So an engineer who takes ownership and responsibility for the project, gets everyone on board and ensure that deliverables are done with the right quality + they are timely, is very valuable.
Become the go-to person in a specific technology
Whichever technology you work with currently, one of your goals should be that you become the go-to person for that technology.
This can be framework-specific, language-specific or overall field-specific (Front-end, Back-end, QA, DevOps, etc.).
My recommendation is to become great (considered expert) at one specific thing and good in a lot of others.
That’s how you can have great discussions basically about any technologies and you can provide expert opinion on one specific.
Others will naturally go to you for specific questions + issues and that will make you very valuable for the team and the overall organization.
Here are some great ways to be considered an expert in a specific technology:
Host learning sessions inside your team or your organization, where you share your knowledge with others
Start writing online - post on LinkedIn or start writing a blog or a newsletter. This is a great way to help others and at the same time, this will showcase you as an expert in the field.
Focus on helping others - word of mouth travels fast and if you are always helping others, more and more people will know that you are a knowledgeable person who likes to help when needed!
Become the go-to person in a specific domain
In every organization, there are specific domains like payments, orders, products, news, etc.
If we are in the monolithic structure of an application, those are considered modules. And if we are in the micro-service architecture, then those are services.
Every domain has specific business logic related to it. My recommendation is to take ownership of the domain that you are working on.
Become an evangelist for that domain by:
Make sure that all the documentation is created and is up to date.
It works flawlessly and you can quickly spot issues if there are any.
You have good monitoring in place and you are continuously checking if any unusual things are going on there.
Others can quickly get onboarded to it and become productive.
You are available to answer any questions that your colleagues may have.
Ultimately if there are too many questions, you can create an FAQ for that specific domain.
🎁 Notion Template: Become the go-to person
Use this template to list down your projects, domains and technologies. This will help you to choose on what you can become a go-to person.
Paid subscribers, you can get it here:
Becoming the go-to person helped me to grow toward Senior and Lead role
When I started with programming, I didn’t think that I could actually be considered an expert in some specific technology. That was my impostor syndrome telling me that. But the more I grew as an engineer, the more I knew that I was not that far from others.
Let me tell you how I became the go-to person in one of the companies I used to work. The company I was working for decided to move from using Server-side rendering of the app to client-side using Angular and I was very excited about that.
I took this opportunity and started learning Angular from various of different sources. I remember I learned a LOT from Maximilian Schwarzmüller’s course (not sponsored).
I was proactively learning Angular in my spare time, which put me in the position where I became the most knowledgeable dev in Angular, which automatically made me the go-to person.
That’s when my value grew substantially and everyone was coming to me for specific questions and issues. I naturally became in charge of the overall architecture + styleguide, guidelines and also for onboarding new devs.
By doing this, my progression has sped up substantially and that’s also what helped me to grow towards being a Senior Software Engineer and later also becoming a lead.
Similarly, I did the same when I changed companies and we switched from using Vue to React. I used the same approach + also took a lot of ownership and responsibility for the overall projects, which got me the offer to become a Team Lead.
Read my full story here: From IC to manager (paid article).
A great reputation always provides a LOT of opportunities
By becoming a go-to person, you also build your reputation over time and that’s what provides you with countless opportunities.
As a manager, if there is an important + impactful project and I am looking to assign it to someone. I will always look at engineers who have built a great reputation for themselves.
These engineers have a reputation for being:
reliable,
trustworthy,
a person that will get the job done.
Build a reputation for yourself and see your career skyrocket!
Last words
If you take 1 thing from this article, make sure to take the following:
Your skills and what you know, are both very important, but sharing your skills and what you know with others is even more!
We are not over yet!
Had a great time hosting a workshop on C3 Fest in Amsterdam this week!
The 2-hour workshop was called From Senior to Lead: Grow and thrive in the role.
We covered:
- Difference between engineering lead roles
- How to grow toward a lead role
- How to thrive in the role
+ many interesting questions from everyone.
That was one of the most engaged audience I’ve seen. Kudos for participating and asking so many questions!
Here are some pictures:
This was a 2-hour version of my upcoming online cohort course that starts on July 9!
If you are not enrolled yet, you can take a look the course here. And you can still get it with the early bird price of 25% off!
Use code EARLYBIRD for 25% off or use this link: Senior Engineer to Lead where the code is already applied.
In the course we will particularly focus on development of much needed people / communication and leadership skills in order to grow from engineer to leader!
Looking forward to seeing you there.
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You are more than welcome to find whatever interests you here and try it out in your particular case. Let me know how it went! Topics are normally about all things engineering related, leadership, management, developing scalable products, building teams etc.
I like the fact that even the knowledge domains get some love using your approach. Domains are cool and need attention too ⚡